The Anchor Room

The Anchor Room

In collaboration with one of its owners, Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, DBC will be creating a news media room to report on the news from our local communities. The show will feature news anchors who will be high school aged youth from the City of Detroit. These anchors will talk to reporters on the scene as well as in studio guests who have been working for positive social and cultural change in their communities.

Detroit high-school aged youth will present material prepared for an hour long weekly news program that will be broadcast on the internet. The youth news anchors will work with youth and adult reporters in writing and editing the news for their programs. The newscasts will consist of several different elements, including interviews with field reporters submitting their reports from relevant locations in Detroit. The anchors will also interview in studio guests offering analysis and commentary on the stories being reported. Using the mobile unit New Newsstand for New News, news reporters will gather and edit interview clips and pictures to tell the stories from Detroit neighborhoods, business and cultural districts, schools and city hall. The stories will be sent back to the newsroom via online streaming and will include live interviews with the anchors. The news that will be reported will highlight images of cultivation and achievement in a city that continues to build on the strengths and ingenuity of its people.

New Newsstand for New News

New Newsstand for New News can be pulled by bike, packed onto a city bus, or strapped onto a car. This unit combines the physical structure of a news kiosk with the production and networked distribution facilities of a content bureau with writing workshops, print and electronic publishing on site outside CAID’s two exhibit spaces, at Detroit Public Schools, on street corners, at laundromats. The physical structure effectively creates a networked local news bureau at each stop, equal parts beacon, kiosk and editorial office. From this base, our artist-writer-educators partner with neighborhood schools in workshops where daily observations on the physical environment can be honed and refined into effective prose, compelling images and reports in dispatches from peer to peer, and from each new voice to each new reader. Using a mi-fi wireless internet router and laptops in conjunction with silkscreen printing, video interviews, and open source software (blogs, wikis, and video streaming) we can create excitement and a hub for these observations—both to receive it and to transmit it. This approach—building an active rather than a passive audience, enables the voices of inner city neighborhoods to be heard across town and across the world.

How To Get Involved

We are seeking people to be part of the production team for our news show, our talk show, the new Detroit based sitcom, and the cooking show. We need writers, reporters, video and lighting technicians, website experts, live internet streaming specialists, artists, set designers, actors and actresses, wardrobe designers, sound engineers, set construction, marketing and PR, catering and much more. Please e-mail info@thecaid.org with “DBC Inquiry” in the subject heading if you are interested in earning a piece of the company by providing a service to the community. What we have is a building that is in the process of being transformed into a TV productions studio, a news station and media space for anyone who needs a place to produce and publish media. We also have a mobile news station that was funded by the Harpo Foundation. The mobile New Newstand for New News will go directly into the neighborhoods with reporters sending stories back to the station.